"For those not in the elite, argues David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, much of modern labour consists of stultifying “bullshit jobs”—low- and mid-level screen-sitting that serves simply to occupy workers for whom the economy no longer has much use. Keeping them employed, Mr Graeber argues, is not an economic choice; it is something the ruling class does to keep control over the lives of others."
Yes, I, as an employer, keep my staff doing "bullshit jobs" because I want to "keep control over the lives of others." WTF?!?! Why would I do that? Why not fire the bullshit job person and use that money to take my family on vacation 4x a year?
It amazes me that some people think there is some ruling cabal in a dark castle somewhere, deciding how to keep the masses in line. Maybe the answer is less evil - I have the person doing the work because I can't afford to automate it yet, or it is not currently possible.
What does the author think of the maker movement? This "Capital Equipment" is now priced at a weeks wage for many US workers. Marx would love it - it puts the means of production in the hands of the common man. I sold capital equipment for years, and what I used to sell for $50,000 you can now do with a $5000 machine. Prices keep coming down, and the machines I sold are no longer made. My job was eaten by progress :)
People will keep re-inventing themselves. It's what humans do.
Bullshit jobs arise in two ways. One is through the crazy inefficiencies of huge companies and governments. This is likely not you. Second is as an emergent property of red queens races in the economy, escalating complexity or overhead that does not actually increase overall macro productivity. The latter requires at least a casual familiarity with evolutionary game theory, but once comprehend cannot be un-comprehended. Most global military competition also falls into this category, and that's double digits of the economy in some countries.
I feel like these kinds of emergent pathologies are a species scale IQ test that so far we have utterly failed.
Creating "bullshit jobs" doesn't need a coördinated cabal. The wrong incentives can manufacture such roles in a distributed fashion.
Consider our tax system. Government bureaucracies refine the tax code. The same bureaucracies that fight each year for their budget allocations from Congress. Districts reward Congressmen who bring jobs home. Increased staffing, cost, taxation and knock-on bureaucracy ensues across government. And complexity. That complexity keeps accountants and tax lawyers employed. They are not interested in having the complexity legislated away [1].
Thus a system generating more and more self-fulfilling (and -employing) complexity. To keep civil servants and tax professionals employed. Cabal-free bullshit jobs. (Consider the difficulty with which structural reforms are being introduced in Greece, Italy and Spain. Those countries' elites are being forced to retrench the bullshit. They will likely pay with their seats of power.)
One example i recall Graeber using for such jobs are call center cold call marketing. Rooms filled with people who sit there all day calling number after number with the hope that whoever answers have any interest in their product.
But is that really a make-work job? I doubt they would pay people to do that if it doesn't make more money than it costs (or at least they believe it does.)
Most of people commenting like this ("'they' can't possibly pay for that unless it makes some kind of ROI") have not experienced business at scale.
Beyond a certain scale of business, sales and marketing management at those levels sometimes becomes very abstract, and relies as much upon suppositions as actual data. This is why brand marketing still exists, even though far more accurate and precise quantitative methods are available now.
Call center cold calling has a miserable return rate, but for some at scale businesses, it need not actually yield a measurable, tangible, positive return to justify its existence. For some businesses, simply the act of making the cold call itself is sufficient justification, because it puts the business' name "top of mind" in the public.
One of Graeber's points is that businesses engage in these activities because the management in decision-making positions at these businesses believe that if they do not engage in these activities, their competitor who does will gain a competitive edge. Most such activities are to generate some kind of constant, dim awareness of the brand name in the buying public.
I think it's more likely that you have not experienced competent marketing at scale. It is indeed carefully measured and managed according to its ROI.
Being so dismissive of brand marketing is a big hint that you might not fully understand it. Consider that even companies that are very savvy about data collection and analysis engage in brand marketing, like Google.
There are certainly lots of companies doing competent marketing at scale, and they are certainly the norm for large SV businesses. That is not in question. But it's a big world out there, and there are a shockingly larger number of big businesses in the world that do throw big, big bucks at brand-establishing marketing initiatives, with very little to no quantifiable and precise marketing-to-sales-to-close-to-per-customer-support-cost metrics. I don't see where I'm dismissing brand marketing (and especially the newer data-driven brand marketing); please point it out so I can clarify with a follow up comment. I'm laying out (to those who might not have been exposed to it) the reasoning that goes on behind seemingly nonsensical activities (like the aforementioned call centers devoted to cold calling). Very rarely in big business do completely harebrained activities last terribly long; in hindsight some activities might have been ill-advised, but over the long run most decisions are made with the best intentions and very hazy decision-making data. I'm pretty excited to see what the data-driven marketing and sales future looks like, myself.
You, as a rational individual who owns and operates a business, will not hire people to do bullshit jobs.
However, a company with professional managers and systems that are somewhat separated from ownership or the putative goals of the business itself will, in an unintended-consequences sort of way, end up creating a bunch of bullshit jobs. The company is too big for a single, rational, human owner to comprehensively supervise, and meanwhile there are legions of middle managers who want to increase their relative importance in the company by having more direct and indirect reports.
I don't think it's a conspiracy to keep control over the lives of others, although there are probably a lot of pathological managers who would be motivated by that that. I think it has more to do with unintended consequences. What Graeber is arguing is essentially a conspiracy theory, and it shares the same weakness of every conspiracy theory, which is that it underestimates just how bad things can get purely out of unintended consequences. Managing large organizations is hard. The difference between doing it right and doing it poorly is literally what creates and destroys most large fortunes. And even if you do it well, you're going to get some inefficiencies that smaller organizations just don't have. It's essentially a scaling problem.
Haven't you ever wondered why companies lay people off when they're in trouble? You'd think they wouldn't hire someone in the first place unless they were pretty sure that hiring that person would somehow contribute to improved profitability, and if it turned out that they didn't do so, they would just be fired in the normal course of their work. No, aside from redundancies created by merger and acquisitions, layoffs are a means of clearing out these backlogs of bullshit jobs.
>Yes, I, as an employer, keep my staff doing "bullshit jobs" because I want to "keep control over the lives of others." WTF?!?! Why would I do that?
One reason bullshit jobs exist is because decisions are made by managers, not some ultimate rational owner who thinks only of profit. In many big companies a manager's status is based on the number of people they manage, if they invent more jobs for people they are more important and get promoted. The same problem exists with corporate budgets, the more money a manager spends/controls the more status that manager has, the faster they move up the ladder, thus managers are incentivized to get as much of the budget as possible and to claim that all the projects and things they purchased helped the company. This prevents the company from even understanding the level of waste which is occurring.
Same thing happens in governments or any hierarchical organisation above a particular size. It is an extension of Celine's second law[0].
For a deeper and much more cynical view of corporate dysfunction read the Gervais principal[1].
>Marx would love it - it puts the means of production in the hands of the common man.
Not sure Marx would love it as it could individualize production and thereby reduce the mechanization and discipline of the proletariat which he felt was necessary for the class to act effectively. I think Proudhon would love it as he was more in favor of individual freedom.
You might be interested to know that Mao tried a maker revolution[2]. It was a complete disaster because it was poorly planned and executed, but shows that Mao was at least open to ideas of radical decentralization.
Not to be pedantic but the wholesale culling of available iron during the great leap forward was not at all similar to the maker revolution. The goal was to pull resources (iron) from the population to be centralized for re-distribution so that the iron could be turned into communal tools like plows and railroad ties.
Somewhere, in the last few months -- alas, I don't recall where -- I read about a company that rates its managers on how much their teams accomplish, divided by the size of the team. They claimed, plausibly I think, that this system effectively discouraged such fiefdom-building.
That's an awful recipe for overworked employees within a short time, unless the formula was only one small part of how managers were ranked. Anonymous management satisfaction surveys getting factored in would be a good start.
I've always wondered if a very broad range of metrics gathered at all times, and a constantly changing formula picked at the last moment, coupled with an explicitly-written policy that if everyone hit the selected high mark then everyone would get rewarded Lake Woebegone-like, would avoid people working towards the formulae.
Maybe the answer is less evil - I have the person doing the work because I can't afford to automate it yet, or it is not currently possible.
This, I think, is basically the situation -- yet the end result looks a lot like the Evil Ruling Cabal Theory of Crap Jobs.
In general, the decision to automate, outsource/contract, or employ is made according to whether (at a very high level), the ability to and cost of automation and/or outsourcing a job (technically and in terms of market expectations); the price of labor; and the number of employees engaged in a company.
Eventually (skipping over the model and proof), what you end up with are, in general, tiny numbers of expensive, high-value employees whose skills are critical to the company, rare and hard to automate; large numbers of cheap, low-value employees whose jobs are too trivial to automate or send elsewhere; and a small number of employees in the middle, who carry out important, hard-to-automate tasks but whose skills are relatively easy to replace. Good jobs are scarce, crap jobs are plentiful, and the traditional middle and upper-middle classes will reasonably fear that they could be replaced at any point by fungible labor.
As we have seen across the world, such conditions create a political and social drive towards correction, though the nature of such corrections are themselves the result of parochial political prejudices (resulting in the Tea Party, the Occupy Movement, "living wage" efforts, anti-immigration legislation, the invasion of Crimea, the Daily Express' circulation numbers, and so on).
Historically, such stagnation has also been corrected by the accessibility of new employment markets (physical frontiers, industrial and postindustrial revolutions or, more recently and on a very small and temporary scale, new petrochemical extraction methods), or the destruction and concomitant rebuilding of industry (such as the post-WW2 efforts in Europe). In the absence of either solution, it remains to be seen what will happen to our societies, but the histories of left- and right-wing revolutions are not encouraging.
I've wrote down some thoughts on possible economics of "bullshit jobs" here: http://250bpm.com/blog:44
Here's the relevant part of it:
"Can we do the same trick here and stop thinking about competing firms and rather start thinking about competing individuals?
After all, firm isn't a person and can't really strive to maximise profits. Only people can.
And when you look at the problem from the point of view of a rational individual, the situation is pretty clear: I need to work to feed myself and my family. If only 50% of population is needed to do all the necessary work, I have to cope with that. I have to accept a meaningless work if that's all I can get. If it's necessary to keep the work, I have to pretend and lie and cheat and support the whole edifice of bullshit work. Damn, I even have to beg, bribe and blackmail others to create a new bullshit position for me, if I can't get an existing one.
So, in the end, large portion of the population, from CEOs to the lowliest interns, are trapped in bullshit jobs and none of them can really speak against it as they are all complicit and the only alternative they have is having no job and starving."
To some extent, bullshit jobs, given however slight of a start, make and propagate themselves.
People jealously guard their career territory through legislative or other means and seek to expand it, even though what they are doing is ultimately of little (or even negative) value. Anyone who has spent any time in an organization of any size has no doubt seen micro examples of this. No dark cabal needed.
"For those not in the elite, argues David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, much of modern labour consists of stultifying “bullshit jobs”—low- and mid-level screen-sitting that serves simply to occupy workers for whom the economy no longer has much use. Keeping them employed, Mr Graeber argues, is not an economic choice; it is something the ruling class does to keep control over the lives of others."
Yes, I, as an employer, keep my staff doing "bullshit jobs" because I want to "keep control over the lives of others." WTF?!?! Why would I do that? Why not fire the bullshit job person and use that money to take my family on vacation 4x a year?
It amazes me that some people think there is some ruling cabal in a dark castle somewhere, deciding how to keep the masses in line. Maybe the answer is less evil - I have the person doing the work because I can't afford to automate it yet, or it is not currently possible.
What does the author think of the maker movement? This "Capital Equipment" is now priced at a weeks wage for many US workers. Marx would love it - it puts the means of production in the hands of the common man. I sold capital equipment for years, and what I used to sell for $50,000 you can now do with a $5000 machine. Prices keep coming down, and the machines I sold are no longer made. My job was eaten by progress :)
People will keep re-inventing themselves. It's what humans do.